You are browsing all posts tagged with the topic: mantras

A month after I started meditating, I went home to visit my mother. This was back in the day—only a few years after the Beatles visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, and caused a storm of mostly satirical press commentary. Meditation was still considered an activity for eccentrics and hippies, and my secular humanist mother found my insistence on sitting every morning hilarious at best. In the mornings, while I was sitting in meditation, she would walk past my closed door every few minutes and call out, “Aren’t you done yet?”

I rolled with it on Saturday. But on Sunday, when she knocked on the door for the third time in twenty minutes, I lost it. Bursting with anger, I got …

One of the most frustrating things in my life is that for the last few months, because of a change in my wife’s work schedule, I haven’t been able to get up to the prison I’ve been teaching in for the last seven years. I miss the guys there. I regard them as part of my “sangha” (spiritual community). I have great respect for them as spiritual practitioners because of the sheer effort they have to make in order to remain sane and balanced in a very challenging environment. Not only do they stay sane and balanced, but some of them bring about huge changes in their lives. …

Bodhipaksa and Sunada combine forces to bring you Wildmind’s latest audiobook — a complete guide to mantra meditation. In this two CD set (available on our online store) you’ll find everything you need to get started with a mantra chanting practice, including:

For six years, I’ve been traveling up to the state prison for men in Concord New Hampshire, where I help, with other volunteers, to run a meditation and Buddhist study group. It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done, and every visitor from outside the walls who has ever visited the group has come away feeling inspired. Our inmate practitioners live in very challenging circumstances, and meditation is their lifeline to sanity — therefore they practice with an intensity that puts many Buddhists “on the outside” to shame.

One of our inmates, Bob, makes malas — the Buddhist rosaries that people use when chanting mantras — and we’ve …

Bodhipaksa and Sunada combine forces to bring you Wildmind’s first audiobook — a complete guide to mantra meditation. In it you’ll find everything you need to get started with a mantra chanting practice, including:

Bodhipaksa and Sunada combine forces to bring you Wildmind’s first audiobook — a complete guide to mantra meditation. In in you’ll find everything you need to get started with a mantra chanting practice, including:

Practitioners of kirtan, a Hindu call-and-response ritual, find it both soothing and uplifting

On a Friday evening, a few dozen people gather in the multi-purpose room of the Westminster Housing Co-op in Winnipeg’s West End. They’ve brought yoga mats and meditation cushions, but they’re not here to work on their backbends or to sit cross-legged in silence.

They’ve come to dip into the same spiritual stream that spawned both those practices, only this time they’ll be doing it by singing in a language that none of them speaks.

At the front of the room, candles flicker and plumes of incense smoke curl toward the ceiling. There is a simple melody, the gentle strumming of a guitar and hand drums offering rhythm as the …

AnnArbor.com: Quakers, Buddhists, agnostics, Hindus – they’re all doing it. Over the last few decades, meditation has evolved from a fringe practice to a mainstream stress-reduction technique that might be recommended by your family doctor.

In Washtenaw County, you have your choice of a wide variety of meditation classes and settings, ranging from the Zen Buddhist Temple in Ann Arbor, to a Quaker center in Chelsea to the Washtenaw Community College Health and Fitness Center.

Nationally, meditation is among top three alternative health methods used by Americans. According to a 2007 survey sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (a division of the National Institutes of Health), more than 9 percent of Americans say they meditate. Only herbal …

In his devotion to White Tara, Jnanagarbha yearns to be filled with her beauty so that he can make the world a better place.

It is a summer evening in the mountains of southern Spain. Above the occasional whir of an insect’s wings, voices drift on the warm breeze from a shrine room 100 meters away. They are raised in unison, chanting a puja: a ritual of Buddhist worship. As I sit quietly on a sun-chair in the dark I conduct a solitary, silent puja. My eyes rest on the point where the steely rocks marking the southern side of the valley meet the deep, deep blue of the Mediterranean night sky. Little by …